Famous white shark observed off O‘ahu feeding on whale carcass

Still from a video of Deep Blue, a female white shark, feeding on a sperm whale carcass. Image courtesy of Kimberly Jeffries Photography.

People in Hawai‘i were mesmerized by the sight of a decaying whale surrounded by tiger sharks last week ― until a celebrity crashed the party. Deep Blue, considered one of the biggest great white sharks ever caught on camera, was spotted on Sunday 13 January 2019 off the southern coast of O‘ahu where other sharks have been feeding on the carcass of a dead sperm whale. Some experts estimate that Deep Blue is over 50 years old.

While these types of shark sightings are rare, great white sharks are no strangers to Hawaiian waters. “White sharks are not uncommon in Hawai‘i,” Kim Holland, a shark researcher at the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB), told HuffPost in an email.

Melanie Hutchinson, a researcher the Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research (JIMAR) and at HIMB, told KHON2 that 20 percent of the great white shark population in California and Mexico migrates to Hawai‘i nearly every year, typically in the winter.